In the wake of the dot-bomb disaster, are you feeling just a
little gun-shy about entering the world of Internet commerce?
You're not alone. Meet Len Stubbs, a 47-year-old former COO of
a life insurance company, who's looking to book a new career in
digital travel. "The travel industry reshaped drastically
after 9/11," Stubbs explains. "It's changing from a
brick-and-mortar environment to an online environment."

But a shift in the market wasn't enough to allay his fears
about e-commerce success rates. "You read the horror stories
all the time," he says.

To prevent his entrepreneurial ambitions from becoming a
disaster headline, Stubbs aligned himself with franchise
Rezcity.com, a portal for 53,000 Web sites with community and
travel information. Franchisees purchase the rights to develop the
Web content for a given ZIP code and get plugged into
Rezcity.com's advertising reservoir. From there, it's up to
the franchisee to contact area merchants and organizations to build
a localized Web presence. Web surfers nationwide travel to one
domain name and can access city guides compiled by thousands of
franchisees. "It's a way to bring people to the site to
see what you've built, what you offer, and that's why this
franchise made sense to me," Stubbs says.

Franchising at Rezcity.com makes e-commerce less impersonal by
providing a local representative, the franchisee, in each
community. Stubbs says if his potential customers in Hilton Head
Island, South Carolina, "run into a snag, they actually get to
talk to a human being. And we're down the street from
them."

As community members, franchisees like Stubbs also have the
opportunity to approach local nonprofit organizations with a
partnership of sorts. How does it work? "If they [use] us as
their home page," Stubbs explains, "we pay them a portion
of [our] commissions."

When he's not indulging his inner philanthropist, Stubbs is
all business. "The projections here can be huge," he
says. "We've got multiple profit centers in this
organization." These profit centers include e-commerce,
advertising and an online reservation system that allows visitors
to make travel arrangements directly from the Web site. In June
2003, Stubbs became one of Rezcity.com's pioneer master
franchisees, purchasing the rights to dole out the rest of the
available Rezcity.com domains in South Carolina. With $90,000 gross
revenue projected in the final three quarters of 2003, Stubbs is
feeling pretty optimistic. "There's some great opportunity
for profit-obviously, that's why we do these things," he
says. "But there's also some opportunity for doing social
good as well, and that's pretty cool."